Having worked in public libraries for close to 5 years, one of the things I love the most about working in public libraries is that we do not compete against one another. Not only do we freely share information, knowledge and expertise with our customers, but we also freely share our first-hand lessons learned, work examples, great wins and losses and more. When our system was looking at reciprocal borrowing, we asked other systems in our state how they created their policies, what were things they wouldn’t do again, what were the wins, and anything else they were willing to share. Our system also looks to another district that serves multiple counties for information they are willing to share. They create amazing marketing materials, both in format and in content.
A particularly challenging area for our library system is the variedness of our branch staff. We have 12 branches across our system and they are rural and suburban. One branch is as small as a shipping container and our largest is approximately 35,000 square feet. Just as the size of our branches are varied, so are the people who work in these branches. I really appreciated the different types of learners detailed in The Strategic, Curious & Skeptical Learner : Australian Public Librarians and Professional Learning Experiences by Professor Stephens et al.
A few branch staff who work in our more rural branches tend to demonstrate some of the skeptical learners’ behaviors. They feel they know their branch, customers and surrounding service area the best, and do not often feel that the training and educational opportunities provided to them apply to the rural areas and themselves. Meanwhile staff within the larger branches in the suburban areas tend to align themselves more with library policies and procedures and find more value in the PLEs offered.
Below is a Pew study that illustrates the how people feel understood by those who live in a differently populated community.
This is a fine line our system was to walk – respecting each branch manager and their community. However, to ensure that each customer receives the same customer service and product, no matter the branch, continuity is important when we are looking at PLEs for all staff.
Facing History & Ourselves. (2024). How urban, suburban, and rural communities view one another: Pew Research Study. Facing History & Ourselves. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/how-urban-suburban-rural-communities-view-one-another-pew-research-study#citation-information-59389
Stephens, M., Partridge, H., Davis, K., & Snyder, M. (2021). The Strategic, Curious & Skeptical Learner : Australian Public Librarians and Professional Learning Experiences. Public Library Quarterly, 41(3), 257–272. https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1080/01616846.2021.1893114
It can be so difficult to manage the different personalities and the perception of needs in the different branches of a single organization. It’s amazing (and understandable) how defensive people become when a perceived outsider comes in to try and promote a new idea or offer some critique on the current services. Some of this, I think, comes from the general tone these organization-wide initiatives adopt. In order to speak to everybody at once, and create a sense of consistency, they have to smooth over some of the differences between different departments and different branches. I’ve seen first-hand in basically every job I’ve ever had how this ruffles some feathers. I think acknowledging the limits of this general tone can go a long way in making the more skeptical members of the staff feel less defensive because they tend to mistake it for dismissiveness or even a complete failure to understand the differences between departments or branches.
Yes, Louis, you are correct in that it is challenging. Some fellow staff and I were talking today about how when one works retail for a corporate company, there is less wiggle room to come up with your own opinion or method of doing things – it is very prescriptive.
One branch manager during a discussing with all 12 of our branch managers said we need to be like Starbuck’s. Her intention was to illustrate that there does need to some continuity for our customers, that they know what they can expect when they go into any one of our branches. However, that was not the correct thing to say to our small rural branches where there most definitely isn’t a Starbucks in their towns…